An astonishing and at the same time disturbing read. Took me some time to get into, but from then on I was hooked. The world Shusterman created feels so vivid and real, it almost scared me. Thought-provoking and highly original. I haven't read anything like this ever before.

Also, it contained one of the most disturbing scenes I have ever read - not on a graphic level, but more due to the fact that what exactly is happening is left almost completely to the reader's imagination (if you've read the More...

I was walking back from my playgroup with my son on Monday, I came out of an elevator to find a teenage boy waiting for me. Fear and an urge to protect my son came over me as he looked a little "rough" around the edges.

Instead of pulling a knife or picking a fight though, the teenager turned on me with big, embarrassed, doe-eyes to ask in a quivering voice, "Excuse me, can I please have fifty cents to call my mum?" I fished out fifty cents worth of coins and left as soon as I saw him head toward More...

As seen on The Readventurer

I approached rereading Unwind with trepidation. I generally enjoy revisiting books in series before each new release, but two reasons held me back in this case:

1) My original reading of Unwind left me completely horrified and I wasn't sure I would want to relive this story again (my husband is still too scared to revisit it); and

2) Unwind was one of the very first books I read when I had just discovered YA back in 2009, and it was also one of my very first dystopias. I More...

this is a great book to use as a springboard for discussions about reproductive rights and governmental responsibility and what kind of world we are creating and leaving to the next generation.

but i'm just going to talk about me. cuz i am a very laissez-faire individual, and i live my life like i am reading a book someone else is writing, and i am just tuning in to see where it all goes, and any discussion of this sort always leads to conflicts, and i think goodreads has enough of those, yeah?

i More...

Holy frak-waffles Batman!! This is awesome.

At first I was like:




... but then I was like:




... and THEN I was all like:



...during that scene where they (view spoiler)[UNWOUND HIS BRAINS WHILE HE WAS AWAKE! (hide spoiler)] I still have the major heebeejeebs.
I will never eat cauliflower again.


Unwind will shock you. I mean, roll-you-up-in-a-carpet-and-bitch-slap-you kind of shock you.

And you will love it.




More...

In a dystopian near future, teenagers Connor and Risa are sentenced to be unwound. When their paths cross with a tithe named Lev, they flee the world they know and become fugitives. But how long can they run before the past catches up with them...?

Imagine a world where abortion is illegal but it's perfectly acceptable to have disagreeable children unwound, that is, disassembled and their organs given to waiting recipients, when they are between the ages of 13 and 18? That's the basic premise beh More...

You are not going to believe me, but I came to this book with open arms. It survived weeks of cuts and call-backs to become one of the final six books that were carefully wrapped in pajamas before being placed in the suitcase and flown to Switzerland. I only take books I am confident I’ll love on vacation. Well, given the length of this trip, space constraints, and my mercurial ways, they also had to be relatively thin, paperback, and fast-paced, but you get my point.

Alas, from the very first c More...

Have you ever wondered if one day, the doctors prefer replacing instead of healing? If one day, the parents can choose to keep or to terminate their child?

“You can't change laws without first changing human nature.”

“You can't change human nature without first changing the law.”

Today, authors of dystopian books are feeding us with various creative ideas. Many of us haven't noticed that Neal Shusterman has written a thrilling, bizarre, and incredible science fiction. This is a story when morals a More...

Thanks to Ace for lending me this spectacular YA book!

This is the best YA dystopian fiction that I've read so far. Compared to say George Orwell's 1984, the writing seems to be ordinary but Shusterman's imagination is boundless. How could have thought of an idea where below 18 y/o teens are unwound, i.e., all their organs are harvested for transplant use?

While I was in the first 50 pages, I found the novel boring as it reminded me of the teenagers killing each other in Suzanne Collins' The Hung More...

Page one, I'm iffy. Pro-life and Pro-choice fight a civil war and the only way to satisfy both armies is the agreement that no abortions take place but from the ages of thirteen to eighteen any child can be unwound and his or her divided body and soul be used as organ donation? First off, pro-choice isn't going to go for a woman sacrificing her body through pregnancy and raising a child thirteen years before she can dispose of it. And pro-life isn't going to go for the termination of a child who More...

OH MY SHUSTERMAN!


Hahahahaha.

That was my face throughout the whole book.

Just kidding. That would be freaky and painful.

Unwind is one of the best books I have ever read. Very rarely do I ever say that. It's one of those books that really KEEP YOU ON EDGE.

Where do I start? I must say, it was amazing in the most heart-pounding way. An incredible, well-crafted, gorgeously written book that is extremely fast paced, gripping, and suspenseful. I'll start in a rather organized way.

1. The characters: Com More...

Final rating: ★★★★★★/★★★★★



This book deserves more than just 6 stars. It deserves 10! This is my ultimate fav young adult and it was one of the most amazing and emotional reads. It's a roller coaster of emotions and don't read it if you don't wish for your heart to shatter, or if you don't wish for your heart to be cut out. Because that's how i felt while reading this.



But - in every darkness, there is light, and even if this book might seem quite grim, it was balanced. Because it's Neal Shuster More...

One of my favourite genres of all time is horror. More specifically, horror that really gets underneath your skin, makes you uncomfortable, gives you nightmarish scenarios your brain likes to remind you of just as you're trying to get to sleep... But I find my high expectations for horror are very rarely met when it comes to YA novels.

Sure, there's horrible dystopias, such as the ones featured in The Hunger Games and Delirium, but neither of them have particularly scared me. I wouldn't want to l More...

It’s impossible to understand other people. It’s impossible to understand ourselves most of the time.

At the very beginning, I honestly wasn’t buying the story. I just couldn’t understand parents who would get rid of their child and celebrate by going on a cruise. I should have known better. Our belief systems, morals, cultural conventions, laws… they didn’t just pop out of nothing. They are so deeply ingrained into our society that we never doubt most of them. People, we're sheep!
I wonder, at s More...

I of course have come late to this party because this book has been out for a while. So many goodreaders love it and then I heard UnWholly, it's long awaited and unanticipated (not from lack of excitement but from surprise) sequel, was coming in. Then I thought to myself, "Enough is enough! Must read this pronto!"

Think about living in a world where disease is basically eliminated and the pro-life and pro-choice people have come to a compromise. What a great accomplishment. Or is it? In this mo More...

4.5 stars. Have you ever finished a book and been left with an almost speechless feeling?

This is how Unwind made me feel. I thought that the concept of kids being "unwound" (this is just a PC term for body parts being harvested/removed from unruly and unwanted kids) was an interesting and new story that I hadn't heard before. Unwinding results in the teen's death, but it was explained in the book as a chance to "live on" through other people.

I expected that the kids would fight to stay alive. I More...

Unwind is one of the few 'hype' books out there that is completely deserving of praise. And not only that, it is one of the best dystopians I've ever read. Why, you ask? I'll refer you to the publication date. Unwind was published in 2007, before dystopians truly took off as the 'next big thayng.' Even before The Hunger Games (2008). In other words, it's truly innovative and original because there really wasn't anything around at the time for it to copy. In a literary atmosphere where more and m More...

There are nearly 5,000 reviews of this book on GR, and the official synopsis explains clearly what is meant by the term ‘Unwind’. So, I am going to assume that those who read this are familiar with the basic premise. If not, that’s okay - some of the context will be evident here. But it is much easier to review this without major spoilers if I don’t try to tap-dance around the basics.

This book certainly deserves its legion of fans, and could become a phenomenal movie. I strongly recommend it for More...

"What if your parents could unwind you?"

This book deserves six stars for its ingenious plot!

The novel opens by explaining that the United States experienced its second civil war instigated by pro-life and pro-choice advocates bent on destroying each other. To end the long, bloody war, government officials came together to create "The Bill of Life," which "states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen. However, between the ages More...

This is one of those books that once I finished it, I started it over and read the whole thing over again. And even after that, there were parts of it that I kept re-reading and thinking about. Before I go into my long review, I wanted to just mention that this book had one of the most nightmarish and horific scenes that I have ever read in my life. It contained almost no details at all, and none of the sparse details were graphic or gory. And that made it even scarier. My imagination provided m More...

WOW! What an incredible read, I couldn't stop reading it! Shusterman is now one of my favourite authors, he creates such brilliant adventures that leave you captivated right until the end! The whole concept of this book is pretty heartbreaking, but is was also very exciting. Following the characters during their escape from being Unwound was a crazy ride that leaves your palms sweating and your heart broken...

Parents have children and know that they'll have them forever and always love them, but More...

What a horrible, horrible dystopian vision Neal Shusterman presents us with in Unwind!

A horrible vision which I found utterly unrealistic in the beginning. I just couldn’t imagine parents having their children "dismantled" because of bad behavior or better say, I couldn’t imagine a society accepting this gruesome procedure as common. After a while, though, I started thinking and considering our history and what people already did let happen, as well as the gruesome things that are still happenin More...

This cover reminds me of the HUMAN CENTIPEDE poster, which really isn't the best comparison. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

DON'T CLICK ON IT IF YOU DON'T WANT NIGHTMARES

(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)]

But, anyway.

UNWIND is pretty awesome.

Amidst the horrified comments from my reviewer friends (“HOW HAVE YOU NOT READ THIS ALREADY, OCEANA?”) I finished reading UNWIND with my jaw slack. Unbelievably creative, with interesting main characters and unique writing, UNWIND is also littered with interesting historical and political facts - not our gov More...

This book is set in a futuristic America where people may retroactively abort a child between the ages of 13-18 by a process called unwinding. When a child is unwound, nearly every part of them will be used as donations for people who need specific body parts. The plot centers on three different characters who are set to be unwound--a boy whose parents made the choice, a girl who is a ward of the state, and a younger boy whose parents had him solely to donate him as a "gift" to God. I was hooked More...

First of all, I would like to thank Teresa for recommending this awesome book to me!

Where to start? Unwind was a thrilling roller coaster from the start to the end. It was a dizzying, amazing ride filled with twists and turns and brought me up and down. Unwind is one the best YA dystopias that I have read next to the Hunger Games because it's so astonishing, shocking, and so disturbing. Neal Shusterman wrote such an incredible book filled with smart, cunning characters and heart-pounding action More...

WARNING: There is a lot of gushing ahead. I mean it, it's almost sickening. You have been warned. --- Unwind is one of those books you can't seem to put down because whenever you finally do, all you end up doing is thinking about the book. It's well-written, addictive, intriguing... and awesome.

The pacing is brilliant. I was hooked from the beginning, which hasn't happened in a while. I also felt like I connected with the characters on a more personal level since it's written in first person nar More...

It's hard to talk about this book because there is nothing left to say.. it says it all by itself.

From the first page the 3 main characters (Connor, Risa, Lev) have some emotional (almost heartbreaking) stories to tell about before and after meeting each other, and you can not 'not care' about their destiny, about what might (or will) happen to them.
Without noticing you start to know them all, to feel their pain, their struggle and you keep reading every page hoping with them that they will ma More...

4.3 average is a really good score for Goodreads. 51% of people who read it gave it 5/5. It’s one of those books that hasn’t had a lot of publicity yet people seem to know about anyway. It was originally published in 2007 and so it wasn’t written to leech off the success of The Hunger Games. I had very high expectations for this book.

I was drawn in at the very first moment as on the first page of the book you are confronted with The Bill of Life:

“…between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a par

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